Bella Union Hotel
| Bella Union Hotel | |
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Circa 1873 view of the Bella Union Hotel
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| Location | Present-day Fletcher Bowron Square, Los Angeles |
| Coordinates | 34°3′15.09″N 118°14′28.33″W / 34.0541917°N 118.2412028°WCoordinates: 34°3′15.09″N 118°14′28.33″W / 34.0541917°N 118.2412028°W |
| Built | 1835 |
| Demolished | 1940 |
| Architect | William Wolfskill, Joseph Paulding and Richard Laughlin |
| Reference no. | 656 |
The Bella Union Hotel in Los Angeles, California, constructed in 1835, is California Historical Landmark No. 656, It was effectively the last capitol building of Mexican California under Governor Pio Pico in 1845–47 and was a center of social and political life for decades. Situated on the east side of Commercial Street, one block east of Main Street, it was later known as the Clarendon Hotel and then as the St. Charles.
The one-story adobe structure was built in 1835 by "three American trappers" — William Wolfskill, Joseph Paulding and Richard Laughlin — as a home for Isaac Williams, a New England merchant who had arrived in Los Angeles in 1832.
In 1851, when Horace Bell, the author of the seminal historical work Reminiscences of a Ranger, first came to Los Angeles, the hotel was owned by James Brown Winston, a medical doctor, and Alpheus P. Hodges, the city's mayor. Bell's book, published in 1881, recounted how the hotel looked when he had stayed there thirty years before:
The house was a one-story flat-roofed adobe, with a corral in the rear, extending to Los Angeles street, with the usual great Spanish portal, near which stood a little frame house, one room above and one below. The lower room had the sign "Imprenta" over the door fronting on Los Angeles street, which meant that the Star was published therein. The room upstairs was used as a dormitory for the printers and editors.
. . . On the north side . . . were numerous pigeon-holes, or dog-kennels. These were the rooms for the guests of the Bella Union. In rainy weather the primitive earthen floor was sometimes, and generally, rendered quite muddy the percolations from the roof above. . . . The rooms were not over 6x9 [feet] in size. Such were the ordinary dormitories of the hotel advertised as being the "best hotel south of San Francisco." If a very aristocratic guest came along, a great sacrifice was made in his favor, and he was permitted to sleep on the little billiard table. [In the bar] during that time were the most bandit, cut-throat looking set [of people] that the writer had ever set his youthful eyes upon. . . . all . . . had slung to their rear the never-failing pair of Colt's, generally with the accompaniment of the bowie knife.
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